University of Austin

If it goes ahead I wonder how the students will react when they find out who Ms Stock is.

Currently waiting to board a flight to Austin - it's the wokest place in Texas! Interesting news. Right on!

This absolutely, however its not as simple as that to argue in real life, as I have definite limits. There is some academic ive seen on the gc Twitter who’s written a book suggesting we normalise and accept pedophilia. I haven’t read any more about it and said academic is unsurprisingly queer, but obviously my gut instinct is let’s NOT do that, and no it’s NOT ok to suggest it. Ditto anyone suggesting the Holocaust wasn’t so bad, and maybe Jews are inherently a problem race. I have zero tolerance for that and could support a hate crime charge for it.
So I don’t know how to simply and eloquently articulate my stance on freedom of thought. I also haven’t put a lot of time into thinking it through, but you always have to be prepared for people to come up with these counter examples, and your philosophy to handle them.

Honestly, I don't understand this perspective. If these ideas are bad, then discussing them won't make them better. If they are compelling and bad, barring from the university is not a solution.

There are academics in philosophy who have argued that abortion rights ought to be extended to include infants up to three months of age. They make a case for this that I don't find at all compelling, but which is quite interesting in a number of ways. And maybe that was their point.

There are not viewpoints that we all just know, without any need to think about it, are wrong. The university is meant to be a protected space, not for students who might get their feelings hurt, but for the most crazy, radical, surprising, offensive, unlikely, profound ideas to be discussed, if those are the ideas that people are having. And if they are compelling that will become clear, no matter how they offend our little god and work against our biases and assumptions, and if not, we can all see it.

There is a kind of deep humility in this as a human exercise, because it says that we may be wrong about the things we hold most dear, and we much subject those things to scrutiny. Whether questions about the Holocaust, or infanticide, whether it's ok to have sex with children, the nature of God, whatever.

but obviously my gut instinct is let’s NOT do that, and no it’s NOT ok to suggest it.

But there have always been academics arguing that. And I don't think they have made much headway, pedophilia is certainly much less acceptable now than it was a few decades ago. Of course we don't know the counterfactual, but I don't think the pro-pedophile academics did much damage directly with their pro-pedophile stance.

In fact now that speech taboos are becoming more stringently enforced, it's the pedophiles and paedophile-adjacent who are leveraging them to their advantage. (I don't know if there are examples of that directly in academia, but there have been countless examples of it on social media. -e.g. the LGB Alliance getting suspended on Twitter for condemning an article by a zoophile, everything that's happened to Reddit.)

And there have been many other examples in history of sexual abusers taking advantage of tabooed speech to silence their victims and get away with their abuse. It's what they do. Putting limits on free speech helps pedophiles and abusers.

So I would say of course let's not do that, and I'm not going to invite anyone who suggests it to any dinner parties and I'd probably also avoid getting in a lift with them, but it has to be okay to suggest it, because that's the price we pay for free speech.

@Floisme Stock would have liked to continue her old job, while to my knowledge Pinker still has a cushy place and isn't cancelled by the students. Disagreements about gender ontology is pretty normal for academia, while travelling on the Lolita Express to an island with some 14 year olds, not so much.

And honestly, if students can't cope with faculty who think things they don't like, they need to choose another place to study, and maybe a different career path.

And many students are less inclined to pay incredible sums of money to try and get what they can out of it.

If the university doesn't provide a place where people can think about challenging things, they will think elsewhere. It wouldn't be the first time the best thinkers began to move outside of universities.

There's a column in the Times today on this

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/at-last-the-us-has-a-truly-liberal-university-tqvw3dgs7?shareToken=7a4138ede795958e8304b68481a863df

I'll ask you the same question I asked Obakarama then StillPerplexed: Do you think this person and Kathleen Stock 'belong together'? And if yes, please could you explain how?

Pinker (one of the big name academics associated with this) wasn't just a buddy of Epstein, he even provided a defence for him in court.

Anyway it's a lot of names for a project with only one course. I imagine at most they'll just be a lot of guest lectures on the topic of their specific area of controversy.

Not sure it's a coherent way to learn stuff, but it could be an interesting primer (from one side) on battles of the culture wars.

My impression is that Kathleen Stock would have liked to have stayed in her old job had she been able to do so without intimidation. But I can understand why some people might prefer to believe otherwise.

This. Especially 'prefer to believe'. The cognitive dissonance is very evident sometimes.

if you have one person arguing Bell Curve ideas about the intelligence of Black people, in a university with a high proportion of BAME students, that Prof might be alienated from all colleagues, but gets bigged up by the amplifying world of social media. So people who are targeted in such rhetoric do feel alienated and wonder why he was employed and what this means in relation to the university. And some lecturers get exhausted having to spend time mopping up after him.

Thanks for answering Obakarama. I appreciate your honesty, although I don't think that kind of protectiveness would have stood me in good stead when I went into in my first job, where I really had to stand and argue my corner.

My impression is that Kathleen Stock would have liked to have stayed in her old job had she been able to do so without intimidation. But I can understand why some people might prefer to believe otherwise.

What has gone wrong with universities (with students? With management?) such that the existence of one single person with dubious views can make the entire place feel unpleasant to work in? When I was at university (Oxbridge) in the 90s there were multiple people in senior positions with extremely unpleasant views, whether political, misogynist or homophobic, in my university. It wasn’t great but we knew there were plenty of people (probably a majority) on our side. How has one person suddenly gained the power to make a whole institution unbearable despite an increasingly large majority being on the other side to him?

They probably deserve each other. Yes, they belong together in their ever so risky university. That seems to be what they want.

Well you haven't answered my question, which was whether you believed they all belonged together? Up to you of course if you'd rather not.

I think what I would have welcomed most as a student would have been teachers who gave me the tools to critique and challenge unwelcome views and difficult and unpleasant colleagues, not to reassure me or try to protect me from them.

And he has been very vocal in his support of Austin.

I am saying there are plenty who would put them together and he certainly supports her, in name of free speech and anti woke. I don't expect she supports him, as he is not a classic liberal, as she is. But these days nothing surprises me.

Are you saying you think that person and Kathleen Stock and anyone who agrees with her views on sex and gender all belong together?

I will tell you why. Because the clown at my uni is one who would be welcomed at Austin and he provides research that racists love to use to prove the end of 'whiteness' and he spends loads of his time tweeting about wokeness and free speech. This means a lot of our time is taken up with reassuring students, explaining that employment law means he can't be sacked, trying to rebuild our reputation as a place where people of different ethnicities are welcomed, reeling from aftermath of resignations because he makes the department an intolerable place to work.It is distracting and dispiriting and intellectually suspect, if not deleterious. I would be so delighted if he left for Austin. At least there students will know what they are buying into.

Why on earth would anyone want all people sharing the same outlook - snarky or otherwise - in one place? What a revealing comment.

hmmh, I think what I do is real teaching. Also all my colleagues do real teaching and real research. This is all a bit of a fiction for people to splutter over their cornflakes. Reminds me of when it was considered outrageous to study English Literature at university (province of weak minded women....) Would be useful if all the snarky liberal-conservatives were gathered in one place though. The rest of us could get on with our real research and teaching.